Please explain how hosting photos within the forum works. Does that get crazy expensive?

[AvidLearner]

I’m concerned about the cost to host photos. (I’ve set up my forum in a droplet with Digital Ocean’s $10 plan - the forum doesn’t have any users yet.) I assume photos are stored within my Digital Ocean droplet. So does that mean I need to have enough storage space with Digital Ocean to accommodate the amount of data these photos take up?

Hosting photos within the forum is important, but how do I guesstimate the cost over time as more photos get added each month? Are there settings to optimize users’ photos?

I would greatly appreciate if someone could provide a simple explanation about photo hosting and costs. Thank you

[awesomerobot (Kris)]

@AvidLearner

I assume photos are stored within my Digital Ocean droplet. So does that mean I need to have enough storage space with Digital Ocean to accommodate the amount of data these photos take up?

Correct, you can alternatively host photos with DigitalOcean Spaces (setup guide) or Amazon on their S3 service (setup guide), which would reduce costs for more storage dramatically.

You also have settings in Discourse to reduce maximum allowed image size, which will ensure you don’t have people uploading overly large images that will take up tons of storage space.

Some guesstimate math from a previous topic:

@codinghorror

On a “typical” Digital Ocean steady state install of Discourse, with the 1GB / 30GB minimum, I am seeing:

30.9% used of 29.40 GB = 9.08 GB used, 20.32 GB free

20.32 GB / 3 MB = 6,773 full size (3mb) images
20.32 GB / 2 MB = 10,160 medium size (2mb) images

So if you have say, 1000 members, and they upload on average 3 images per year per user (3,000 images/year), assuming an “average” image size of 2mb, that means you’d run out of disk space in about 3 years.

Clearly it depends heavily on

• size of your community
• what they are uploading
• how often they are uploading

But there’s some back of the envelope calculations that seem reasonable to me.

So extending that math into DigitalOcean Space’s 250GB for $5/mo… if you had 1,000 users uploading 3 images a year at 3MB each… you’d be covered for around 27 years.

[AvidLearner]

@awesomerobot

Correct, you can alternatively host photos with DigitalOcean Spaces (setup guide) or Amazon on their S3 service (setup guide), which would reduce costs for more storage dramatically.

Thank you! That’s extremely useful information.

I suspect the forum will be photo heavy, but, since I have zero users at this point, I don’t know yet. Would you recommend setting up the forum to host photos on DigitalOcean Spaces or S3 before a public launch of the forum?

Also, does Discourse optimize the photos? If so, is there documentation on settings for this feature? (I apologize for what are likely very basic and obvious questions - I’m a little slow on the uptake. ) Thank you!

[awesomerobot (Kris)]

@AvidLearner

Would you recommend setting up the forum to host photos on DigitalOcean Spaces or S3 before a public launch of the forum?

Yes, it would be easier to start that way rather than migrating down the road.

@AvidLearner

Also, does Discourse optimize the photos?

No, not the original files that are uploaded (which is why we recommend restricting maximum upload size in the settings). Discourse creates optimized images for displaying within posts (to cut down on loading time/bandwidth use), but a user can click on that image to view the full-size original.

If it’s absolutely necessary, we do have a script that could be run manually from the command line every now and then to trim down the size of the original images stored on the server

@neil

The script is downsize_uploads.rb . Run it like so:

cd /var/www/discourse
RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec ruby script/downsize_uploads.rb

It will try to downsize images to be 1 megapixel or less, or you can pass in the max size you want.

[AvidLearner]

Thank you, @awesomerobot! Your response has been incredibly helpful and has relieved some of my pre-launch worries.